Local Knowledge in the Environment–Development Discourse

Abstract

This article takes a critical look at the various approaches representing local knowledge as a scapegoat for underdevelopment or as a panacea for sustainability, these two representations characterizing the conventional environ-ment–development discourse. The static oppositions of local versus universal knowledge are challenged by establishing more diversified models to analyse the relationships of heterogeneous knowledges. The study emphasizes the complex articulation of knowledge repertoires by drawing on an ethnographic case study among migrant peasants in southeastern Nicaragua. Knowledge production is seen as a process of social negotiation involving multiple actors and complex power relations. The article underlines the issue of situated knowledges as one of the major challenges in developing anthropology as an approach that subjects fixed dichotomies between subject and object, fact and value, and the rational and the practical, to critical reconstruction.